Michael Ubac: From PDI reporter, editor to new columnist

MANILA, Philippines — Michael Lim Ubac, a homegrown talent of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, starts his column, “Moving Into High Gear,” with the Opinion section today.

Ubac, who started as a reporter for the Inquirer in 1997, has covered civil society, courts, police, local governments, as well as the National Bureau of Investigation, the Ombudsman, the Supreme Court, Congress and Malacañang during the Estrada, Arroyo and Aquino III administrations.

He became chief of the daydesk in 2013, a position he held until 2019 when he left the paper to pursue graduate studies and his environmental advocacy.

He finished journalism at the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines Diliman, graduating cum laude. He was an Inquirer scholar in his senior year and joined the paper after graduation.

He earned a master’s degree in international relations from Harvard University in 2016 and a master’s in global leadership from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he graduated summa cum laude and bagged the leadership award in 2022.

Awards, scholarship

His Harvard thesis on climate impacts in the Philippines earned the Director’s Prize for Outstanding Thesis in 2016.

Ubac’s work as an Inquirer journalist has been recognized by various award-giving bodies including the Society of Publishers in Asia Awards and the Office of the Ombudsman for his antigraft exposés.

He recently accepted the offer of Trinity International University in Illinois to be a program scholar fellow for Ph.D. in educational studies, the second highest scholarship offered by the university. He is the first Filipino to receive this scholarship.

Ubac is a member of the US-initiated Climate Reality Leadership Corps, which advocates a global solution to the climate crisis, and of the Climate Reality Project Philippines.

‘Begging for resolution’

“Returning to the Inquirer as a columnist this time around feels like a homecoming of sorts,” Ubac says.

His column comes out Thursdays.

“We Filipinos are on a journey to improve ourselves, both individually and collectively. For excellence to become our way of life and impact those around us, we need a broader change in momentum. This is a movement, a shift into high gear, if you will, to be able to raise the bar in whatever context we find ourselves in,” he says.

The column is his attempt to “examine some of the pressing issues of the day, or gain a fresh perspective on recurring issues that keep us up at night, begging for a resolution. To do that, we need to start a new conversation in which alternative viewpoints will be given space—even those that may not easily fit our worldviews.”

Readers can expect pieces on leadership, international relations, journalism, social media, artificial intelligence, conflict and peace, education, history, climate change, environment, immigration, and religion.